Hi. I have been having problems shelling after lofting somewhat organic shapes in MOI. It goes to calculation mode and then fails. I also use a Alibre parametric cad program and this has issues also with shelling. It just freezes. I am wonder if my computer is just no powerful enough for these tasks. I have an HP all-in -one desk top computer with 8 gig of ram and a intel core i3 chip. About 6 years old. I can not up grade this computer as the chips apparently are soldered in place. I do not have the technical background to know what would be the best computer to alleviate these problems .
Thankyou
Harry

Hi Harry, it's more likely to be a problem with the model geometry than a lack of computer power.

Part of the process of a shell operation is generating an offset surface.

That's kind of like tracing along the surface with a pole and generating a surface at the other end of the pole. If you have any areas where the surface folds over top of itself or has a lot of "high frequency" bumps in a small area those get magnified at the other end of the pole.

The surface probably needs to be generally higher quality, smoother and simpler for an offset of it to not explode into tremendous complexity.

This is all kind of a guess though, it's hard to know for sure without being able to examine the model. If you can please post the .3dm model file with the object you are trying to shell that would help to give more specific advice. You can e-mail it to me at moi@moi3d.com if you don't want to share it publicly.

- Michael